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dreamofcentipedes · 6 years

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Red Lotus Blooms: 6 - To Ashes

Summary: A monster is forged in flame. As light burns out, red leaves unfurl. Chi She Lian fights its final battle, and Tatara's world is reduced to ashes.

Characters: Tatara, Houji.

Rating: Teen Words: 8,219 Link to AO3

Link to Table of Contents.

A/N: I made an 8tracks for this series, if anyone's interested in some background music. Also, linguistic note, I'm British, so what I call the First Floor will be the Second Floor to American readers (we call the floor beneath the Ground Floor).

What they thought to be the remains of Fei Huo were recovered from a junkyard in the 5th District. They were charred and dismembered, with the kakuhou ripped out and harvested, but the Chi She Lian ceremonial garb together with the dry strands of white hair that still clung to the skull left little doubt. Fei, with no forewarning, had not come back to the mansion that night, so Yan had sent out scouts to search for her. This was what they returned with three days later.

Tatara saw it. There was little that could be done to prevent that, although Yan knew it was best not to shield the young man. Tatara had been so quietly concerned that he had wanted to join the scouts himself if Yan had not counselled him to avoid areas where the CCG had been active recently. He was too valuable a piece to lose so carelessly. A leader should know to pick their battles on their own terms and to delegate when necessary. He told him all this and he listened, but he had still waited ardently by the doorstep for days on end for the scouts’ return - and so he saw it.

An ice chilled over that fiery spirit. Yan could see it in his eyes. He sat there staring at the exploded limbs until Yan ordered them to be taken away, and sat staring at the same empty spot long after that. Eventually, he turned to his elder brother and spoke softly, but with something like a charnel rage consuming the light of his eyes.

“Who did this?”

“The doves. Our spies reported their presence in the 5th District recently, and there was no kakuhou in the body. It seems certain it was them.”

Tatara returned his eyes to the spot where the remains had been, boring a hole into the table with the force of his gaze.

“We’re going to destroy the doves, aren’t we?”

“Yes, that’s right.”

Yan had to stifle his hesitation. Certainly, that had been the plan from the start, but that plan seemed to have gone hopelessly awry. A flock of doves may be coming to their doorstep soon enough, but with how little time they had to prepare, Yan could not be sure who would be destroying who. He had a few divisions of Chi She Lian troops standing by specifically out of caution for such an eventuality; the heightened CCG presence was obvious enough as it had considerably delayed his scouts’ efforts in locating Fei. However, it was not the army he needed, and he hated battles where he could not ensure victory.

But for Tatara’s sake, he inched closer and added.

“We’re going to kill every last one of them.”

Yan did not lay a comforting hand on his shoulder and he certainly did not embrace him, for he was not that kind of man. This was the only kind of comfort that he understood. And from the red-blooded bile flooding into Tatara’s face, he knew he understood it, too. It was the kind of comfort that made one strong.

Nevertheless, when Yan had left the room and shut the door into his study, that strength drained out of him. He collapsed into his chair and lay flat against the desk, staring at the wall.

He had failed.

He remembered the childish terror that had reawakened in him when he realised his parents had to be disposed of. He remembered how his father masked his heartbreak with paternal outrage, how his mother had looked at him with disdain and disappointment and fear, and how he made those faces unrecognisable. They had hit him again and again and again, but when it came his turn to hit them, they never got back up. That was the essence of the weak. When he escaped that smoking bier and saw Tatara’s frightened face waiting for him at the other end, he knew the path he had chosen was the right one. He knew what he was fighting to protect.

Everything I have done, I have done for my family.

But Fei could not see that. He could not make her see that. And because of that failure, she had…

Yan had organised a search of Fei’s room after he sent his scouts out. Her disappearance so soon after their argument felt too timely to be a co-incidence, and sure enough, he found two aeroplane tickets to Tokyo in her desk together with forged passports under different names for her and Tatara.

He could not know for sure what Fei had done, but the evidence suggested that she had intended to smuggle Tatara out from under his nose. It would have been easy for her to throw her family weight around and get one of the Lian ghouls to forge passports for her. Then she had engaged with the CCG, purposefully or otherwise, and…one way or another, it was clear that Fei had betrayed Chi She Lian. Yan could already smell the scent of annihilation seeping into his chambers.

He had already decided not to tell Tatara. That lust for vengeance would be the fuel he needed to survive the CCG onslaught. Telling him risked complicating that.

And - it would destroy him.

There had already been too much destruction. Yan was still waiting for the phoenix to rise out of it all. Wearily, he pulled himself out of his chair.

Perhaps not in my lifetime, Yan ruminated. Perhaps there needs be a bigger bonfire yet.

He stepped slowly to the great window at the back of his office that looked out over the Beijing skyline, illuminated by the radiant summer sky. Its enormity was breathtaking to this day.

Chi She Lian would live through Tatara. The dream, ghoulkind’s salvation, the nirvana outside this infinite cycle of suffering – he would realise it. Yan was fully confident that was how Tatara would choose. But he would have the ability to choose.

Then this, Fei, is my concession to you.

There was something remarkable about this final Beijing skyline. Like a fresh corpse, the city had stopped breathing. The roads were free of traffic, and the streets free of people.

The dove blockade had begun.

We will leave it to the man himself to decide which ghost he will honour.

It was such a normal summer’s day. The skies were bright and blue with great clouds roaming lazily along, and the breeze that met the hordes of CCG infantry barricading the roads of Xuhangli was fresh and pleasant. It was really a stomach-churning contrast. Even such a gentle breeze felt harsh to Houji, who had formed ranks with the rest without fully knowing what he was even doing here.

Wu had managed to summon a gargantuan force from the higher-ups when she submitted her report. After living in fear of Chi She Lian for so long, it should not be surprising that they would spare nothing when the opportunity came to finally crush them. Among the three hundred investigators stationed outside the Huo residence, there were sixteen Special Class Investigators including Wu and thirty of Associate Special Class. Nothing would be left to chance, it seemed.

The evacuation had been undertaken on the day itself, much to the surprise of the citizens – naturally nothing could have been announced in advance, lest they gave the game away – and now fences and tape and robust bulwarks had been erected in a wide radius around the mansion. All that was left was to huddle like sardines and wait for the order to advance and for the bloodbath to begin.

Lives would certainly be lost this day. Houji had written a testament, a practice he found, to his comfort, was in effect in China as well. It was something that, for the Clown Operation, he had put a lot of effort and thought into – showing his gratitude for the people who had brought him this far and honouring those he had lost along the way. His testament this time was also respectable to the uninformed eye. But not to Houji. This time, he could not write anything but a carbon copy of his previous testament. He had lost the will for anything more.

Packed tight against the hulking investigator who had murdered her colleague in cold blood, Houji wondered what would be on her testament. Would it be blank, like that of the quiet but phenomenal young investigator Kishou Arima? No. Certainly Arima’s testament in advance of the Clown Operation had surprised Houji at first, but, rather than an expression of carelessness, he had come to see how deeply it was true to Arima’s somehow empty nature. Wu’s nature could not possibly reflect such profundity. More likely she just wrote some crude joke.

He could not forget the looks on their faces as they had died – Jiang, and the ghoul too. How camaraderie and honour to one’s oath were discarded without a second thought, trampled on like trash. In trying to understand the events of that day, Houji had wracked his brains to reformulate his picture of Wu, and his efforts took him back to the day of his first encounter with Chi She Lian and the conversation he had had with her on the rooftop. It began to make sense – twisted, terrible sense, but the logic of the Whale was consistent. Where Houji had asserted the importance of working for the benefit of the whole, Wu had only ever spoken of her own advancement and her own satisfaction. She was an isolated unit in a swarming world, above its concerns and above its values.

And yet, she got results.

The thing that hurt Houji the most was that he could not even bring himself to hate Wu. She was the embodiment of a concept so beyond him that he could not feel so towards her any more than he could towards a tiger or a typhoon. Because of her callous, heartless actions, Chi She Lian would be wholly crushed. If she were not there that day, two highly dangerous ghouls from a legendarily powerful bloodline would escape to live another day, and there would be a chance the whole operation would be rumbled.

Houji had long been looking for the reason Wu held the high position she did against all the odds, and it was more than just her skill with a quinque. It was precisely this unpersonality of hers that allowed her to push the cause of the CCG so far forwards. No wonder she spent so much time investigating by herself. Houji remembered how she had told him and the rest of the team how they would only get in the way, and she was right. Not for lack of skill, but for lack of depravity.

So when the moment had finally come to take down Chi She Lian once and for all, Houji could take no pleasure at the prospect of avenging the deaths of his comrades over these past two and a half years. When thinking of the ghouls he was soon to exterminate, he could only think of the horror on that teenage girl’s face when Hollow had blown her to pieces.

In some ways Wu in her cavalier selfishness was more aware of what it really meant to be in the CCG than he had been. That was the reality Kousuke Houji found himself faced with. He felt the pull of two giants at his legs and shoulders: simultaneously, his desire to destroy Chi She Lian was weaker, while his imperative to do so was even stronger. His pity for Jiang and the ghoul was uncomfortably contrasted with ggrudging awe for the harsh necessities Wu espoused.

Houji truly hated the air here.

When the calm breeze began to blow more harshly, a voice was carried on the wind. A sharp voice in Mandarin was yelling out over a megaphone the order to advance. And Houji followed suit: because that was his role.

The building was quickly surrounded. The white shapes of the Chi She Lian ghouls inside the mansion rushed past Tatara, quickly assuming battle formations and erecting crude barricades in the hallways. The house was large, so there would be plenty of opportunities to catch the invading army off guard once they breached its walls. Yan had alerted the nearby Lian squadrons about the attack by telephone, although there was no telling how quickly the reinforcements could arrive on such short notice. Their small force would just have to hold their ground as long as possible against the white leviathan bellowing at their walls.

Moving to one of the windows, Tatara could see the ghouls burst out the doors en masse to intercept the advancing doves. Watching the ensuing carnage unfold, Tatara wished he could be down there. His bikaku unconsciously slipped out of his cloak and reflexively crunched the air within its grasp. He imagined a human head caught between its red veins, bleeding and then bursting apart until it was no more recognisable than what Fei had become.

The blood within his veins felt drier since then. A horrific emptiness had run from his brain down to his body when he was forced to look upon what had been his sister, stilling his body with cold like a needle.

He was glad the doves had come now. He was glad he was not forced to contemplate what exactly he had been fighting for all this time when his family had been laid dead at his feet once again. He was glad he was not forced to contemplate what he was even doing standing here. Now, he could feel a hellfire warming up his heart again, and he knew what he would do.

He would defend Yan. He would defend Chi She Lian. And he would avenge Fei a thousandfold. He would create a field of ashes where these human insects now swarmed.

He took out the aeroplane ticket from the forged passport Yan had given him and crumpled it in his fist. How could he expect him to run? It was the last thing he expected from Yan, even if it was only meant to be a last resort. He brushed his fingers against the cool red iron mask covering his mouth. He had even given him this. Tatara knew what it meant: he was trying to pass the torch down.

He had no intention of carrying it. If Yan went down, so would he, spoiling the snow-white feathers of these doves with blood along the way. He was fully healed from his encounter with the Longxia. He only stayed his feet now because he trusted Yan’s strategy; but as soon as the doves broke in, he had no intention of running.

He stuffed the items back into his pocket. Then he took up his position at the top of the tall, winding staircase, and hungrily waited.

Houji was already panting from exhaustion by the time they dealt with the outside forces. Chi She Lian ghouls were not easy prey. They had become savvy to methods of avoiding the destructive capabilities of Hollow, much to Wu’s annoyance, though each blast still left none ungrazed. Houji stood over the corpses and shook the blood off Iitsu before hearing yet another loud bang as Wu blew the mansion door down. Swept up with the tsunami of the crowd, already smaller than it had been when it arrived, he burst through the empty doorframe into a large mahogany hall, furnished with an onyx statue of a Chinese dragon and a red rug that led all the way up the winding staircase at the back.

There was little time to admire the décor. Immediately doors from either side of the hall burst open and white-cloaked assailants wielding glistening koukakus charged directly at them. Houji ducked in and out of the flurry of blades, spinning back and forth and carefully waiting for the right moment to lunge forward with his quinque. Thankfully, quinque combat was Houji’s specialty. He punctured one’s throat and disembowelled another, stabbing one through the eye and another through both cheeks. However, with this many assassins, even Houji’s dexterity could not avoid shallow cuts to the arms and legs, and the blood that mingled with his black battle gear was somewhere between ghoul and human.

He was the lucky one. The conflict spread out across the entire room, and, when he had eliminated enough blades lurching towards his face that for an instant he could breathe freely, he could see fallen bodies all across the long stretch. The lifeless arm of one investigator lay by his feet with a wedding ring on its finger, and further along he observed a decapitated human head slide across the gory floorboards. Houji felt another painful stab of misery when he realised it belonged to one of the men on his team. But within the room of screaming sound, Houji found he could not differentiate the cries of the humans from those of the ghouls.

The thought died as quickly as it appeared as Houji was quickly brought back into the fray with a barrage of shards from ukaku on the staircase. His head was now filled with nothing but the spike of adrenaline and the rhythms of battle. He rushed towards the enemy, slicing apart the shards in the air with the elegance of a duelist and shouting out a primal cry as Hollow’s explosions lit up the world behind him.

Tatara waited as he heard the instruments of war sounding off closer and closer. Risking a glance out the window, he noticed the few numbers of CCG who had remained outside the building were being thrown into disarray. The bloody shards he could see smash into their ranks confirmed it: at least one reinforcement group had arrived. He took solace at the greater chances of victory, but his itch remained unsatisfied. He could feel his whole body heating up as he prepared to rain down hell from above.

He heard one shout rising above the rest. Over a cacophony of cries of panic and the sound of blood spurting from fresh cadavers, a yell reverberated through the hallways as one tall, broad, inky-haired man emerged up the stairs onto the first floor clutching two long sanguine blades. Tatara was caught off guard by how quickly he seemed to be advancing on his own, and before he knew it, five, ten, fifteen other investigators followed him as he charged towards the dining room where Yan laid in wait. There was no more time.

Tatara threw himself off the railings of the second floor stairway and activated his half-kakuja in mid-air. As soon as his helmet was formed, he let out a titanic burst of flame. The landing and staircase both combusted and huge burning chunks of them tumbled down onto the investigators climbing up to the first floor. Some were crushed, some retreated, some fell through the floorboards, and when Tatara hit the first floor, a miserable number were directly incinerated.

As usual, the kakuja frenzied Tatara’s judgement, but the blind panic of the Longxia’s den had been replaced with the pure, undistilled fury that now guided Tatara’s every action. The same choler that had beheaded the Longxia in a single punch now unleashed itself in a Jurassic roar. The brute force of his kakuja’s pillar-like appendages swept like a bulldozer through the ranks of doves, knocking aside their quinques and cracking open their skulls again and again and again.

“FEEEIII!” The beast clamoured.

When the doves on the ground floor scrambled back in retreat from the young titan bathed in flame, the creature turned its head to the investigators behind it who had darted so nimbly past the ukaku guards. Most were speeding onwards to the dining room or breaking off into side rooms, but for a split-second Tatara caught the eye of the inky-haired man who, for a split-second, had stopped in his tracks and turned his gaze backward. For that split-second, Tatara recovered enough of his reason to acknowledge the look of misery on that man’s face, before the dove sped off and Tatara felt quinque bullets against his back. His ire boiled over again. He turned back to his enemies storming the stairs and scourged them with flails of red flame.

It was sheer chance that it was Houji who found the right door. Chance, or destiny. There was something about those grandiose, gold-panelled gates that spoke to him of the dragon’s lair. He pushed aside the enclosures with a sweep of his hand and came upon what must have been a dining hall. The chandelier still hung menacingly, but the chairs and long cloth-draped tables had all been pushed to the sides. There was only one thing that could catch one’s attention when entering that room.

The shadow of a colossus loomed large beneath the candlelight. At the end of the hall, the familiar cold blue flame burned expectantly at the head of the Herculean silver form of Houji’s old foe. The ghoul codenamed Loong. The business giant Yan Huo. The leader of Chi She Lian.

Houji’s concomitant investigators quickly formed ranks behind him amid gasps of fear. Houji immediately entered a defensive stance. This would decide it, he knew. In a closed-off room like this there could be no escape for either of them. This unrelenting tension of equal and opposite forces would finally yield a victor. Beads of sweat formed on Houji’s head as his heart began to beat faster. His body was ridden with the anxiety of a finish line.

He heard a great rumbling amidst the low roar of the fire. The demon began to speak in a voice like an earthquake.

“What is your name?”

The creature had no eyes he could see, but Houji knew it was talking to him, just like how he knew that it would be waiting in this room. Speaking to ghouls was ill-advised unless necessary, but somehow he felt compelled to give it at least this much.

“Kousuke Houji. First Class Investigator.”

There was a pause before the fiend posed its next question:

“Did you kill Fei?”

Houji’s face crumpled. Fei…Fei was her name. He remembered how the burning kakuja that had ambushed them had screamed her name. For a moment, that scorching abomination felt all too suddenly human. Now, the great grey nightmare hunching in front of him felt the same.

It did not change what he had to do.

“Yes.”

Because now, I am no different than her.

The sapphire flame seemed to glow all the brighter and spewed forth furiously from the sides of his bonelike helm. Yan Huo entered a battle stance. His voice was suffused with spite.

“Then your death will not be merciful.”

Houji felt his whole body tense with anticipation, gripping his quinque with an almost maniacal tightness as he stared down the grimness of the task before him. Then, slowly breathing out, he pressed down his emotions as he had become so accustomed to doing: as circumstances had forced him to do.

“Excessively passionate emotions rob one of their objectivity.”

More than a warning to his opponent, he meant it as a mantra to himself.

Inexorably, and with a final growl, his adversary charged forward.

Rage dominated Tatara. He was blind to the legions of doves assailing him, senseless to the quinques shattering against his skin, deaf to the shrieks of the pulverised investigators. All was the blood-rush of anger. There was only one thing he heard that pierced the roar of the rapids in his brain. A far-off sound, in the room he meant to defend. A man by the name of Kousuke Houji was in there now, who had just admitted to killing his sister.

He flung the investigators off him with a smash of his pole-like appendage and breathed fire at them so that they clambered away desperately, howling in pain from the burns. Using the moment’s opportunity, he turned around and began sprinting towards the dining hall.

The strategy had been to hold off the other investigators so that Yan would not be overwhelmed with too many enemies at once; that way he could concentrate on destroying the cream of the crop while Tatara dealt with the mounting piles of chaff. Tatara’s position on the stairway was also meant to ensure his greater mobility if the numbers became too much, thus allowing him to escape by retreating to a higher floor and heading to a window at the back of the building. Tatara had already set the upper stairway ablaze, lacking any such intention, and now he abandoned his position and Yan’s strategy to head directly into greater jeopardy. Wrath had overpowered anything left of reason, and his berserker mania would not tolerate the murderer behind him breathing a second more.

His turned back rendered himself vulnerable to the barb that nestled into his shoulder and blew open his carapace. Tatara’s great armoured weight plunged to the floor with a fierce thud. Infuriated by the obstruction more than the pain, he twisted his head around as he used his poles to push himself off the ground, and spied through the fumes a fat, grinning old lady dove wielding an ukaku quinque.

Rationality sparked in Tatara’s mind for a moment at the sight of her. Yan had warned him about this one: despite her appearance, she was highly dangerous. The Whale, they called her. Shouldn’t someone of her calibre have been in the vanguard? But before he could process anything further, another barb came flying directly at him.

The kakuja’s bestial instinct took over and swung its pole to knock the bolt aside where it exploded against a wall and burned a hole straight through it. Anger spiralling at the assault, Tatara barrelled directly at the Whale, belching out a protective blaze along the way. He was gaining on her like an enraged rhino and almost reached the staircase where she had taken up position before a missile exploded just below his feet and sent him flying backwards. His kakuja helmet cracked on impact with the ground and, with the scent of the smoky air that poured through, Tatara regained some of his logical faculties.

More and more barbs were flying around him and exploding in front of him so that he could not rise. The half-kakuja was just too heavy and unwieldy against this relentless onslaught of firepower. Tatara shot a quick look over his shoulder to where Yan was fighting the man called Houji. He could hear the sounds of combat within and he desperately wanted to join Yan, but, narrowly dodging another barb and shielding his face from the explosion, he knew there was small chance of that unless this woman was dealt with first.

He grasped the edges of his helmet from around the crack and, with a mighty tug, broke it off. Cracks ran through the rest of his kakuja which he smashed through, and extracting his more nimble, humane body from the shell, he darted liquidly in between the combustive arrows until he shot his bikaku kagune into the wall above her and swung up onto it. She could not turn around in time before Tatara descended on her, grasping at her eyes and beating at the sides of her head with a whirlwind of fists. She spat out blood, calling out the name “Jiang!” as if for help before cursing and bludgeoning her quinque against Tatara’s back - but he clung on, animalistically.

The other investigators took the opportunity to pour past the combatants towards the dining hall, as well as the investigators who had been searching the other rooms on the first floor and dealing with the Lian forces therein. The full mass of the doves on the ground floor could not completely push through, because of the fires ahead and the Lian reinforcements who had broken past the CCG barricade behind. Still, there were far too many getting past for Tatara’s liking. He gripped the sides of the Whale’s head, hoping to snap her neck and end it, before she suddenly threw herself backwards down the stairs.

Tatara instinctively leapt out of the way and launched his kagune into the high wall, pulling himself upwards; but his escape was hindered by an enormous strain on his leg, as the Whale clung onto it. His kagune was stretched taut and his leg screamed at the ligaments, but his ghoulish strength managed to handle the weight and he successfully pulled himself up close to the ceiling. He flung Wu off him with an asslike kick of his leg, and her grip finally relented, flying off onto the hitherto untouched second floor with a painful thud.

Now was the opportunity to finish her, while her old and frail body was winded. Tatara propelled himself onto the second floor and bore down on her with the razor-point of his kagune. Just as he moved into point blank range, the old lady swung out her quinque and cracked Tatara across the jaw, shooting him across the hallway. As Tatara pulled himself up, rubbing the wound, he saw she was standing again and was raising the quinque in his direction.

Tatara ran before the projectile obliterated the space where he was standing. He pelted down the narrow corridor to the left as barbs exploded in front and behind him. Whenever he tried to turn around and fight, a burst of flame would send him backing away again. Tatara gritted his teeth in frustration. This was not where he wanted to be. He should be down there, with Yan, fighting against Fei’s murderer. Instead, he was trapped in this narrow labyrinth, dodging pellets to the cackle of whalesong.

Special Class Li was the next body to join the towering inferno. He would be joining Special Class Gao, Special Class Wang, Associate Special Class Chen, and a whole host of other names that Houji had not had the chance to learn. All in all, well over fifty investigators had been slaughtered by Loong. The number of Special Classes and Associate Special Classes among them was, to Houji, an unbearable horror. The best and brightest of the Chinese CCG were being squashed like so many ants by this king of the urban jungle, the ghoul supreme.

The troops who had been with Houji at the start were obliterated almost immediately. He was exceedingly grateful for the reinforcements that arrived, but even with all their manpower they struggled to put a dent in Loong. No matter how many stratagems they devised, no matter how many beatings he took, he withstood it stalwartly before reducing his attackers to cinders. His onslaught was relentless, and as more and more warriors poured out against him, the frenzied speed of the battle seemed to last an eternity.

Houji realised what was different about this battle. It was the first time both parties were fighting without the intention of escaping. This was the reality of Loong’s strength when he had nothing to lose.

He was jolted out of his hopeless reverie by the shock of a sudden hand on his shoulder and a voice that had faded from his hearing.

“Houji! Houji! You’re Houji, right?”

Houji turned to face the voice, blinking away his horror. He vaguely recognised the square, middle-aged visage and close-cropped black hair of the man talking to him.

“Yes, that’s right. Special Class Zhao…?”

He gave a firm nod. “The boys say you have the most experience fighting this thing. You think you have a shot?”

Houji looked at him, dumbfounded. His eyes swam back to the battlefield, where Loong was decimating a squad wielding rinkaku quinques. Couldn’t he see the reams of far better men Loong had already stomped under heel? Zhao followed his eyes.

“Fair point.” He grumbled, massaging his temples between his stubby fingers. “I thought as much. But what if –” he briefly paused as though it was challenging to continue, before meeting Houji’s eyes with an intense stare. “What if we gave you an opening?

“An opening…?”

“A suicide charge.”

Houji was speechless. Then he was indignant.

“Special Class, how many investigators would –“

“How many investigators are already dying?” Zhao snapped back. “Caution is useless against this monster! Whatever happens, we need to nail Chi She Lian today. Forever. Or who knows how much more blood will be spilt? I’ll lead the charge, they’ll trust me. Then you need to take advantage of the distraction. Can you do it, Houji?!”

Houji felt a terrible frost inch over his neural matter. It felt as though the walls of his identity were narrowing more and more the longer he stayed here, the values he upheld, the principles he held dear, crushed mercilessly by their inwards march. Or worse – he would have to destroy them personally just to leave enough room for him to survive. Or what remains of him…

“Houji! There’s no time to vacillate, I need an answer!”

Houji’s head throbbed with the memory of that day. Yes, there were two deaths back then. Wu had killed Fei…and she had killed Jiang…

“Houji!”

“Yes!” He yelled, and then, controlling his voice to an even tone, “Yes. I will do it.”

He decided he would do what needed to be done. If he did not remain objective, then there was no telling where his emotions might take him.

Zhao gave a final nod and a lingering look that said he was counting on him, before he rushed off to rally the remaining fifty-odd people in the room to their almost certain deaths. Houji gripped his quinque with hands that were no longer shaking. There was a time before now when he had delivered a major blow to Loong, and if he had not retreated, perhaps he could have even finished him. That meant the lives lost here were already on his hands. There was only one way he could atone. By granting an ending to all of them. To all of this. A final stroke to put this whole sorry story to its conclusion, no matter the cost.

Houji replayed in his head his first encounter with Loong from all those years ago. He remembered it as clearly as if he had been shot back in time – every movement had imprinted itself precisely into his memory in the clarity of the near-death experience. Taking into account everything he had learned in their subsequent fights, he devised a plan.

When he saw Zhao leading masses of investigators in lotus formation against the platinum dragon, Houji lifted his feet off the ground and began to run. He sprinted against the backdrop of blue flame as warriors flung themselves into the air only to be crushed against the wall, pounded into the floor or broiled in ruthless calefaction – but they kept on coming. As Loong batted them off of him like flies and snorted out jets of flame, Houji found the opening they were sacrificing themselves to create.

Angling his body just right, he would slide beneath Loong like before and hit him right in the centre of his chest. When he fell to the floor, before he had the chance to breathe fire Houji would ram Iitsu into the opening of his helmet and finish him off. That was the plan. But when Houji glided across the floor to make the initial hit, Loong threw down his appendage.

He managed to roll out of the way at the last second. His eyes darted up to see the black void inside the helmet staring down at him with what looked like a forest of eyes masked in its shadow. That darkness was abruptly lit up by a luminous blue.

The stream of fire lurched to the side as Loong was struck in the face by an explosive projectile, narrowly missing Houji. The onslaught continued, explosive after explosive, while a sea of investigators hacked and slashed at Loong’s feet. Loong kicked and stomped at the investigators and threw up his great arms like a cross to shield his face.

Houji was struck with a sudden inspiration. If he did not strike now, he knew he would never have this opportunity again.

From his close position, he leapt right up into the air. Loong saw him coming, but his heavy arms were not fast enough, and Houji thrusted both spears of Iitsu through both of those arms at once. His armour had been weakened by the shells from the other investigators, so with a hefty feat of strength, Houji was able to crush the quinque through the layers of crust that remained. As Houji fell to the floor again and rolled to create some distance, he grabbed a quinque like a poleaxe from the body of an investigator covered head to toe in third-degree burns. Spinning around again to face Loong, he saw the kaiju shaking his arms in wild frustration as the weight of the quinque bore them down and letting out a low moan of pain.

In an instant, Houji was darting back again, his legs stamping against the burnt, broken and blood-slicken floorboards to propel himself over the immobilised arms of his foe and fly straight for the head. Before Loong could raise his head in time, the axe came crashing down, splitting the helmet apart and slicing through the flesh beneath.

The thought Houji had when the awaited moment finally came was strangely serene. It was: Rest now. Who those words were for, he could not say.

The axe completely its trajectory, and with one final howl, like a dying wolf at an unforgiving moon, the great kakuja collapsed on the floor. Houji landed on its legs, and saw, at the head of the beast, through the monstrous flesh that had covered it, something that had resembled the face of a man – now bloodied, now mutilated, but a man nonetheless. A ghoul…and a man.

Still panting for breath, Houji looked around the room to see what remained, or rather, who remained. He saw about ten people standing. They were about as noticeable as plankton in the expansive ocean of warm bodies piled dishonourably around the dining hall. It was an apocalypse of life.

Houji set his teeth together and scanned the room for Zhao. He found him, unconscious but alive, but for how much longer he could not say. His left arm had been torn clean off and blood was pouring out effusively. He had to receive medical attention immediately, and Houji almost left to call for a medic, before remembering that his mission was not yet complete.

Whatever happens, we need to nail Chi She Lian today. Forever. Or who knows how much more blood will be spilt?

That’s what Zhao had told him. They had dealt with the head of the snake, but that had not collapsed the organisation when Svarog died. Houji remembered in particular the smaller kakuja he had encountered on the stairway, and how similar it had looked to the corpse that now lay in front of him. So long as a single member remained, they would be a threat, and all the lives lost here today would mean nothing.

Tearing his eyes away from Zhao’s pitiful state, Houji pushed another survivor towards the casualty before running for the exit.

This ends today.

As he ran, a howl reached Tatara’s ears. He froze in his tracks, careless to the Whale’s pursuit. Wordlessly, it spoke to him, and he knew what it meant.

It was a howl like death.

The next barb the Whale shot out, Tatara caught by the tail and threw back at her. She narrowly dodged to the side with a yelp and fell on her back, when Tatara began storming towards her, his half-kakuja encircling him again mid-motion. The Whale fired off barb after barb at her approaching enemy and they all hit home, blowing up against Tatara’s chest and blasting off chunks of armour, but his pace did not slow in the slightest. He could not feel that pain above all the rest.

Now the Whale was scrambling to her feet, but when she finally managed to stand, Tatara had almost closed the distance. In a manic movement she jolted up her quinque and targeted her foe.

“Stay back, you overgrown lizard!”

His pace did not slow.

A beam of red hot flame roasted the Whale’s hand before she could pull the trigger. The quinque cluttered to the floor as she reeled back in horror. Tatara seized her by the neck. His voice gargled like a burning bush from the back of his throat.

“You shouldn’t have interfered.”

Then he set her on fire.

Her skin burnt up like dry parchment. The more she screamed, the tighter he gripped and the closer he moved, bringing the fire with him. The choked noises she eked out were hardly decipherable, words like “Stop!” and “Please!”, but they were lost in the discordant song of burning flesh and Tatara’s own screams, of hatred and Whale and Yan and Houji and failure. By the end of it, nothing escaped Tatara’s mouth but flame, and nothing escaped hers but smoke.

He flung her lifeless body to the ground and started walking back down the corridor.

It was not long before he collapsed. All of a sudden the pain from his wounds flooded through him, and it took a masterful effort of willpower to even stand back up. He had to keep moving. To avenge Yan. Kill Houji. Kill them all.

Kill kill kill kill kill kill kill kill kill-

He fell to the floor again, chipping his helmet. The ensuing rush of common sense was enough for him to realise it was useless. So he lay there, waiting for them to come to him. They could all go out in the same singular blaze.

There was nothing else left for him now, but to kill them.

The crack in his helmet spread, and the whole thing collapsed around him. A stab of fear plunged into him. What if he died before anyone arrived? How pitiful that would be. He did not want that. He could not let that happen. So again, he struggled to rise.

As soon as he was up, he had to press himself against a wall. His cheek brushed his hand and he felt the cold metal of Yan’s mask around his face. It was so icy it nearly brought tears to his eyes, but they would not come. It was as though the noxious heat had dried them all up inside of him. He had always hated crying. Now that door felt closed off to him forever, he supposed his wish had been granted. A barely audible laugh escaped his lips, muffled behind the mask, dry, bitter and cynical.

I wonder if this is how it felt, he wondered, to be Yan.

His brother never let a weak emotion show. Tatara did not know if he even had any. Always calm, collected, in control. It was that coolness that had kept Tatara safe, and had made Tatara strong. He had raised him up out of infantile vulnerability and made him the ghoul people spoke of as Salamander with fear on their lips. Tatara had wanted to protect Fei in the same way. She was his sister, even if she did not understand, so he tried his hardest - but in the end he failed her, too. She had protected him more times than he was willing to admit, but when he tried to protect her...

He had been protected all this time. In the end, even Yan had wanted him to run. He touched the frosty metal again.

He had been protected. And he had failed to save them.

So if he tried to avenge them now, he would fail them too.

The simple equation coaxed the embers inside of him. He could not die yet. First, he would have to become stronger. Strong enough to avenge them both. Otherwise, he would just be taking the coward’s way out, blessed with the ease of a useless death without ever atoning for his failures. He refused to dishonour the memories of Yan and Fei that way. For their sake, he would stay in perdition for just a little longer.

He searched for an escape and remembered the window at the very back of the house. However, even if he could limp his way there, he would still have to deal with the CCG surrounding the building. There was a good chance the Lian reinforcements were still keeping them occupied, but at this pace he could hardly hope to slip by unnoticed.

Tatara stared down to where the smoke was billowing into the air. He had an idea.

Houji had scoured the building and exterminated what footsoldiers remained, but there was no sign of even the corpse of the second kakuja. The only unexplored area was the second floor, to which the stairway had been carbonised. Reluctant to leave any stone unturned, Houji hauled himself off the shoulders of a colleague onto the isolated passageway. He saw signs of combat and isolated flames, and noted particularly the large holes of explosive damage indicative of Hollow.

Wu, Houji mused. He had not seen her in the fight against Loong. She was meant to be in the vanguard with the rest of the Special Class Investigators, but she likely could not manage the same pace as the rest of them. She had a bad habit of doing whatever she pleased in any case. Had she been fighting that kakuja? Houji wondered what he would find at the end of the corridor.

What he found he was not sure of. Had it not been for the sight of Hollow lying on the floor, Houji could never have recognised the body of Huiyin Wu. It was charred black as the night, with whatever features or expressions its face once held melted into sludge. It was torn asunder, with a leg here, an arm there, the head lying not much further off, and with other parts missing entirely. It reminded Houji of how the body of Fei had looked after Wu killed her and harvested her kakuhou.

He knelt by the body, closed his eyes and put his palms together in respect. He had not liked her, and perhaps, for a time, he had even hated her; but she had made him, for better or for worse, what he was today. She had taught him what it took to survive and what it took to win. Bearing this in mind as he watched over her desecrated skin and bones, Houji felt the force of irony, and could not laugh.

Picking up her quinque, Houji moved along the corridor to find an open window. He looked outside. He could see a trail of CCG bodies lying on this side of the grounds, but it disappeared into the general carnage of CCG and Chi She Lian alike amidst the barricades. Houji’s shock scarcely affected him at this point. Chi She Lian reinforcements must have attacked, though he could not see any left alive. They had not gone quietly.

There was no sign of the kakuja ghoul.

What Houji felt, staring out into the empty air, was not anger or frustration. Just despair. Despair and pity.

He pitied everyone. He pitied Wu, he pitied Jiang, he pitied Zhao, he pitied his colleague whose head he had seen decapitated. He pitied Loong, he pitied Fei, he pitied this nameless ghoul that had escaped his reach. He pitied the scores of human dead and ghoul dead alike; and he pitied the lives of all those that would perish because he failed to capture this ghoul this day.

He had his suspicions as to who it was. Fei had mentioned a second brother – Tatara. Another member of the Huo family. After everything it took to defeat Loong, Houji understood how even Wu could be defeated by a ghoul from this bloodline. And after everything that they had done here, Houji hardly expected him to live quietly.

He looked to the massacre outside, and then to Wu’s remains and the torrefied ruins behind him. He had wanted to end everything today so he could leave these ashes behind.

The wind had blown them this way. Would the day ever come when it would scatter them again?

In the depths of the Beijing sewers, a white-cloaked ghoul wandered through the river of grime and primal matter. His limbs were exhausted from fighting off the CCG by the barricades, but the Whale meat kept him going long enough to find a manhole to slip down in the chaos of the melee. There had been plenty to feast on, though it was all roasted to hell. The bitter taste lingered in his mouth.

Bitter, bitter, it was all so bitter.

He fished in his pocket for the ticket that Yan had given him. Beijing International…to Narita, Tokyo. Japan. Yan had chosen well. He surely could not have predicted this, but if anyone could…

Houji was a Japanese name. This battle would not end here.

Guided by this shaky light, he slipped from the ashes, like a salamander.

#tokyo ghoul #tg fanfic #red lotus blooms #tatara #kousuke houji #rlb

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